Understanding & Solving Customer Journey Pain Points

Your prospective customers are on a digital journey. From the moment they land on your page – you are their tour guide. Make their stay a comfortable one, and your organization will reap long-term benefits.

The story goes a little something like this: They find your website, browse your content, and sign up for a trial, convert to be a paying customer and return for years to come. It sounds so simple, yet at each turn, there’s a drop-off for potential customers to leave.

If you take the time to understand what happened at each drop-off, what the customer journey pain point was, you can increase conversions and reduce churn. Consider this your cheat sheet to understanding customer journey pain points and how to solve them.

What are Pain Points?

A “pain point” describes a moment in a customer’s experience that causes frustration, emotional discomfort, irritation or hassle.

For example, imagine a prospective student browsing the web for institutions of higher education. They may become discouraged when they land on a page that is cluttered and confusing. Obtaining the information they sought becomes time consuming, or perhaps impossible. This causes a negative emotional reaction and will most likely result in abandoning the search.

A user who subscribes to a SaaS product and finds themselves unable to navigate the platform with ease might have a similar reaction. In the digital age, “back” and “unsubscribe” are always in comfortable reach. It is your job to make sure your users don’t want to take that route.

Customer pain points can be detrimental to a business when left unattended. However, take the time to listen to your customers and understand your product’s shortcoming and you can turn these moments to your advantage. Identifying and mapping key intersections in the customer journey will help you better understand how your customers are experiencing your product.

Map your Customer’s Journey to Identify Pain Points

The best way to find a pain point is to map each step of a customer’s path — from their very first interaction with your brand. Start creating this map by noting significant customer milestones in sequential order.

For example, one milestone might be “sign up for free trial.” Reaching this point requires the user to first gain a basic understanding of what your product/service does and how it can help them. Not being able to access, find or decipher this information constitutes a pain point. The resulting “map” offers a visual report of how your customers are interacting with your brand online and where they are having trouble.

Customer Pain Point Examples (and how to solve them)

1. Finding information that resonates with them.

As we mentioned earlier, if you want visitors to your site to retain interest and convert to paying customers — they must be able to find value on your site. One of the biggest customer journey pain points for potential customers is failing to engage right off the bat. The material is right there, but searching for it is perceived as work. If you can find a way to reduce the burden of extracting useful information, it can do wonders for this customer pain point.

We performed an experiment that tested this hypothesis, using our very own Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) to take visitors on the ultimate virtual “tour” of our website. The results were stunning. We saw a 907% increase in conversion rate just by guiding the user through general information. You can read all about how we did it here.

2. Onboarding to your trial version

Once prospective customers have found your website valuable and expressed interest in your product, they will sign up for your free trial. This is prime customer pain point location. In order to reach the finish line, you must impress them enough to leave them wanting more. Fail to do this and customers will quickly click away.

Essentially, the free trial conversion comes down to effective onboarding. The learning curve is steep and you only have a short timeframe to make your point clear. Can you teach users to navigate your product in a limited amount of time? Remember, they aren’t married to you yet — so it better be engaging. Employ WalkMe’s help to guide your customers through the most sophisticated processes and show them the hidden features. That way they will get the most out of your trial with minimal effort.

3. Maximizing the value of your product

Congratulations! You now have a paying customer. Now it’s time to think about additional customer pain points that could potentially lead to churn.

Invest in robust analytics such as WalkMe’s Insights that allows you to see where user journeys are stalled or disrupted. This gives you the ability to easily fix these issues before they rack up a bill in support and churn costs. If WalkMe was part of the entire process, your customers will know to trust the launcher for fast and reliable self-service.

WalkMe pioneered the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) for organizations to utilize the full potential of their digital assets. Using artificial intelligence, machine learning and contextual guidance, WalkMe adds a dynamic user interface layer to raise the digital literacy of all users.